It took her a while, but Mississippi Corrections Commissioner Pelicia Hall has finally acknowledged the obvious.
This past week, while being questioned by state lawmakers during budget hearings, she said the 16 deaths of inmates in state custody last month were “abnormally high.”
Of course they were. Yet for weeks Hall maintained the death toll in August was not all that unusual.
The Southern Poverty Law Center and Mississippi Today called her out on that, though. They independently calculated that the August death rate was about three times higher than average.
Her first insistence otherwise is partially why the SPLC and other groups are asking for greater transparency from MDOC on inmate deaths.
Historically, the agency has been terrible about communicating with the public. The August deaths are just one of many examples.
